‘I’m so sorry,’ mother tells children, thinking she’ll die

The Nevada woman who spent days trapped in her boyfriend’s Jeep eating tomatoes during a Sierra snowstorm made a goodbye tape for her young twin boys.

“I’m so sorry that this happened,” Paula Lane, of Gardnerville, Calif., tearfully said into the camera she was holding before leaving the Jeep to hike to safety. “As soon as the sun comes out I am going to have to try and make it. It is six-feet of snow so I don’t think I am going to do so well. But nobody is going to find me here.”

Lane and her boyfriend, Roderick Clifton, 44, of Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento, had decided to test Clifton’s four-wheel drive Jeep on a closed, locked mountain road near Pickett’s Junction on Nov. 29. After driving miles down the deserted, desolate road the two became stuck in the snow.

They tried to dig themselves out, Lane told Matt Lauer on the Today show, but were unable to free the tires. Lane said she quickly realized she and Clifton could die in the cold.

“Actually about 20 minutes after working trying to get it out that Thursday (and) nothing, I knew,” she told Lauer.

Clifton decided to leave for help Nov. 30. When he did not return after a couple of days, Lane left the Jeep as well. On her trek to safety, she came across his body.

After she’d been missing for six days, Paula Lane’s brother, Gary Lane, went searching in a front loader vehicle and got lucky, finding her crawling on the dirt road. He put her in the bucket of the front loader and drove her to safety.

Gary Lane told police that he knew where to search because his sister had camped in the area near Burnside Lake. Authorities found Clifton’s body later that day.

Paula Lane said her goodbye video was difficult to watch now that she’d survived the ordeal.

“It is really hard,” she told Lauer. “When I first made the tape I wanted it to be more of a happy good bye.”